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Thursday, May 26, 2011

The publication in our "On the Contrary” blog of this excerpt from an essay by Mr. Jackie Muhammad, is not to be construed as an endorsement of his views or those of the Nation of Islam. It is published herein to stimulate research, investigation and debate outside the narrow confines of what the Establishment gatekeepers of information regard as permissible.

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The Role of Prominent Rabbis and Slavery Explored

by Jackie Muhammad

Excerpted from Nation of Islam Research Group | Volume 2, Issue 20, 2011

One of the world’s best-known rabbis was Moses Maimonides, a twelfth-century Rabbi who is considered one of the greatest thinkers in medieval European thought. He evidently was not thinking when he said that Black people were “biologically inferior” and that Black Africans were “lower than the ranks of man but higher than the ranks of apes.”

It is very interesting that Rabbi Maimonides would make these observations when Black Africans, known as the Muslim Moors, exercised economic, political, intellectual and cultural hegemony over most of Western Europe. Rabbi Maimonides was considered “the symbol of the pure and orthodox faith,” and his writings are considered “the greatest work of Jewish religious philosophy.”

However, when we move beyond Orthodox Judaism and encounter Reform Judaism we are faced with the same disturbing concerns regarding the role of the Jewish rabbis. Reform Judaism maintains that the religion and Jewish traditions should be modernized and be compatible with participation in the surrounding culture. Many aspects of Reform Judaism hold that Jewish law should be interpreted as a set of general guidelines rather than as a list of restrictions whose literal observance is required of all Jews.

Reform Judaism was founded in America by Isaac Mayer Wise. Wise was a rabid, recalcitrant, racist rabbi who referred to Jesus as a “near lunatic,” and, like his predecessor Maimonides, considered Black people as subhuman. Rabbi Wise openly boasted that White Jews gave Christians a God and a religion. According to the landmark publication The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 2, Rabbi Wise’s students were some of the “most notable Jewish clerics in American history.” Among them were Max Heller, Morris Newfield, Isidore Lewinski, Max Raisin, David Marx and Moses Jacobson, all of whom served in the south.

A troubling alliance developed between racist rabbis and members of the Confederacy. This alliance led to a symbiotic relationship between and among members of the southern slavocracy and the Jewish religious leadership. One example is that of Rabbi James Gutheim, the New Orleans Rabbi and ideological student of Rabbi Wise, who in 1862 encouraged Southern Jews to support the Confederacy, and prayed to God to bless the Confederate slaveholders. When desegregation of the New Orleans school system was proposed, Rabbi Gutheim came up with an alternative: he founded a Hebrew school in protest.

Among the Jews and southern slave owners, it was an open secret that rabbis owned and rented slaves. Rabbi Morris Raphall of New York, the nation’s highest paidclergyman, defended slavery and like others of his coreligionists claimed that God Himself had sanctioned slavery. Rabbi and historian Dr. Bertram W. Korn, an acknowledged expert on nineteenth-century American Jewry, was not shy in stating that “Jews participated in every aspect and process of the exploitation of the defenseless blacks.”

Wise, Maimonides, Raphall and other Jewish rabbis used the Talmud to justify their concept of racial superiority over Black people. In the southern Jewish ethos Blacks were scapegoated and demonized so that Jews could develop without the impediment of racism. The rabbis played a crucial and strategic role of supplying “spiritual air cover” for racist Jewish and Gentile slave owners to justify their dehumanization of Black people in the institution of American slavery.

The HolyQur’an calls out the rabbis and the doctors of law like the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper and the Center’s Dr. Harold Brackman when it asks why don’t the rabbis reprove the unrighteous and aberrant behavior of the recalcitrant, racist Jews. “Why do not the rabbis and doctors of law prohibit them from their sinful utterances and their devouring unlawful gain? Certainly evil are the works they do.” –Holy Qur’an 5:63

The reason is that the rabbis have benefited financially from the enormous profits gained from our enslavement. Indeed, it was the rabbis who invented the Curse of Ham Myth, which enabled and facilitated the enslavement of the Black man. Therefore, this conspiratorial relationship between the rabbis and their slave-dealing co-religionists benefited the entire Jewish nation in America and throughout the world. A part of this conspiratorial relationship included the deafening silence of those Jews who knew what was happening to the Black man was wrong but chose to be as silent as synagogue mice.

For example, what accounts for the entire absence of Jews from the abolition movement? They did, however, participate in the Civil Rights Movement whenever their self-interests coincided with our Black interests. But we were used as the battering ram, while they benefited from our knocking down legal barriers.

More important, however, was their control of the Civil Rights Movement through their control of the civil rights organizations. There is hardly a Jew who would not agree that the Jews used their financial wealth, legal expertise and public- relations skills to start, organize and manipulate the direction and issues that organizations like the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee adopted.

Further, leaders like the great W.E.B. DuBois were used as figureheads, promoted by them to give the appearance of independent Black leadership. Jews used their wealth, power, and influence as board members, board directors and presidents of our organizations to steer these organizations in the direction they desired to see them go, not in the direction Black people wanted to see their organizations go.

Ask yourself these questions: how many Black board members, board directors or presidents of B’nai B’brith have you ever heard of and do you know? Have Black people ever been in charge of Jewish organizations?

WASHINGTON (May 24, 2011)—The National Council of Synagogues and the Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) discussed “Sources of Authority in Catholicism and Judaism” at their semi-annual consultation in New York City on May 17. Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta, Chairman of the Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, and Rabbi Alvin Berkun of Pittsburgh, Chairman of the National Council of Synagogues, presided.Father James Massa, executive director of the USCCB Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, spoke on the “sources of authority” in the Catholic theological tradition. He noted both similarities and differences between Catholic and Jewish ways to interpret sacred texts and pass on religious beliefs and practices.“One of the obvious differences between our two faith communities is that while no one rabbi or religious body can speak for all Jews, the Church has a ‘Magisterium’ made of bishops in communion with the pope, whose interpretation and application of the word of God can be binding on all Catholic believers,” Father Massa said.His presentation highlighted the levels of authoritative teaching in the Church, to which are owed corresponding degrees of assent. Father Massa noted that some teachings on Jews and Judaism found in Nostra aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, reaches the level of dogma or defined doctrine. “One cannot hold to the charge that the Jewish people, either in the first century or at any other time, are responsible for the death of Jesus (the so-called charge of deicide) without falling out of communion with the Catholic Church. It contradicts both Vatican II (1962-1965) and the Council of Trent (1548-1563), not to mention a proper reading of the New Testament,” Father Massa stated. Father Massa suggested that when Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI affirmed that for Catholics the Jewish covenant remains a living and positive reality today, they were not speaking on the same level as an ecumenical council like Vatican II. “However, their teaching reflects the deeper impulses of the council, which were directed at laying to rest the teaching of contempt (that God had rejected the Jewish people) and at putting Jewish-Catholic relations on a new course of friendship and shared commitment to healing the world. Such authenticteaching could achieve—God willing—an even more authoritative and solemn expression by some future pope or council,” he noted.Rabbi Avram Reisner, professor of ethics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, presented on sources of religious authority in Judaism. “Everything begins with the Torah, viewed as the revealed word of God,” Reisner said. When it comes to normative religious practice, the interpretations of prophets, sages, and rabbis whose judgments gave rise to the Mishnah (2nd century C.E.), and later the Talmud (completed in the 7th century C.E.), would be decisive in mediating the word to subsequent generations, he said.At only one point in Jewish history did Judaism ever have a body of authoritative teachers that approximates what Catholics mean by a Magisterium. Reisner pointed out that this was the period of the Sanhedrin (200 B.C.E.—70 C.E), the Pharisaical council that ruled on matters of the Torah from Jerusalem. “Is it any coincidence that the Christian community emerges from Judaism precisely at the time when such a body of authoritative teachers is in place for the parent religion?” Reisner asked.Throughout the medieval period and into the modern age, authority in Judaism resides in majority practice and in the judiciary. Reisner spoke about the importance of the responsa in forming schools of interpretation. Local rabbis would make a ruling on a particular religious ritual or obligation, and then solicit a confirmation of the ruling or a better opinion from other legal scholars. Over time the “responses” to these inquires were collected and formed the great legal codes of Maimonides (d. 1204) and Joseph ben Ephraim Caro (d. 1575), which remain classic sources of religious rulings till this day.Reisner also examined different contemporary approaches to religious law and ethics within the various denominations of Jewry. The Orthodox view the first five books of Moses as “God’s literal word” having divine authority, he noted; whereas the Conservatives place the Torah within a tradition of unfolding interpretation that includes modern historical perspectives. For the Reform and Reconstructionists, Jewish history and law inform religious practice but in a manner that allows for a wide degree of interpretation based on contemporary needs.The group also discussed recent uprisings in the Middle East. Members expressed concern for the large Christian minorities in Egypt and Syria, where the situation is volatile. Regime change in many of these countries poses particular challenges for Israeli security and peace efforts with Palestinians, they noted.The beatification of the late Pope John Paul II on May 1 was acknowledged as a cause for celebration for both Catholics and Jews. The late pope made extraordinary gestures of friendship, culminating in the historic visit to the Wall in Jerusalem where he asked pardon of God for past sins committed by Catholics against Jews. Catholic participants at the consultation also included Bishop Basil H. Losten, former bishop of Stamford for Ukrainians; Auxiliary Bishop Denis Madden of Baltimore; Christian Brother David Carroll, former associate director at Catholic Near East Welfare Association; Atonement Father James Loughran, Graymoor Ecumenical Institute; Msgr. Guy Massie, Ecumenical Office of the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York; Father Dennis McManus, special assistant to Archbishop Dolan; Father Robert Robbins, Ecumenical Office of the Archdiocese of New York; and Jesuit Father Drew Christiansen,America Magazine.Jewish participants included Rabbi Jerome Davidson, Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Beth El, Great Neck, New York; Rabbi Lewis Eron, Cherry Hill, New Jersey; Judith Hertz, NCS Advisor; Rabbi Richard Marker, chairman of the International Committee for Jewish-Christian Consultation; Rabbi Joel Meyers, executive vice-president emeritus of the (Conservative) Rabbinical Assembly; Mark Pelavin of the Reform Action Center, Washington; Rabbi Jonathan Waxman, Temple Beth Sholom, Smithtown, New York; Rabbi Jeffrey Wohlberg, past president of the (Conservative) Rabbinical Assembly; Rabbi David Straus, Central Conference of American Rabbis; Rabbi Gilbert Rosenthal, National Council of Synagogues; Jack Fein, United Synagogue ofConservative Judaism; Rabbi Richard Hirsh, Reconstrucionist Rabbinical Association; Rabbi Moshe Birnbaum, Rabbinical Assembly.---Keywords: National Council of Synagogues, Commission on Relations with the Jewish People, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, USCCB, “Sources of Authority in Catholicism and Judaismm,” dialogue, Archbishop Wilton Gregory, Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, Rabbi Alvin Berkun, Father James Massa, Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, Rabbi Avram Reisner

(End quote from the USCCB. Emphasis supplied)

The following New Testament Scripture has been nullified by the the Second Vatican Council, two popes (one "Blessed" and the other still reigning), and the current bishops of the United States, in a manner similar to the way in which the rabbis have nullified the Old Testament: "...the interpretations of prophets, sages, and rabbis whose judgments gave rise to the Mishnah (2nd century C.E.), and later the Talmud (completed in the 7th century C.E.), would be decisive in mediating the word to subsequent generations."

"For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved — so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But God's wrath has come upon them to the utmost.” 1 Thessalonians 2: 14-16

Monday, May 23, 2011

Michael Hoffman’s Note: Daniel McGowan, PhD. is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) in Geneva, New York. He is one of the most astute supporters of the human rights of the Palestinian people, having created a memorial statue to the holocaust of Palestinians at his lakefront home, and founded Deir Yassin Remembered, the association dedicated to commemorating the more than 100 Palestinians murdered in the village of Deir Yassin April 9, 1948, perpetrated by the Israeli Irgun and Stern gangs at a time when Elie Wiesel was working as a propagandist for the Irgun.Here below is a dossier which concludes with McGowan’s rejoinder to a letter by members of the faculty of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in which they sought to deny him the right to call himself “Professor Emeritus,” after he published an article in a local newspaper which they stigmatize as “hate speech.” Here’s a sample of the faculty’s classic Stalinism: "Freedom of speech is a right for citizens in a democracy...Hate speech, on the other hand, is a trickier issue for campuses to wrestle with because while free speech has a special value, we have a duty to protect members of our diverse community from unsupported vitriol...”According to Prof. McGowan, the text of the faculty’s 2009 letter was withheld from him for 20 months. He did not obtain a copy until this month; hence his rejoinder now.

2. Statement by six witch-hunting members of the Hobart and William Smith faculty, to College President Mark D. Gearan (gearan@hws.edu), Oct. 3, 2009

3. McGowan Letter to the Faculty of Hobart and William Smith, May 22, 2011

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What Does Holocaust Denial Really Mean?

By Daniel McGowan

Finger Lakes Times, September 27, 2009, Section D, p.1+

In April 2007 the European Union agreed to set jail sentences up to three years for those who deny or trivialize the Holocaust. More recently, in response to the remarks of Bishop Richard Williamson, the Pope has proclaimed that Holocaust denial is “intolerable and altogether unacceptable.”

But what does Holocaust denial really mean? Begin with the word Holocaust. The Holocaust (spelled with a capital H) refers to the killing of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II. It is supposed to be the German's "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem. Much of the systematic extermination was to have taken place in concentration camps by shooting, gassing, and burning alive innocent Jewish victims of the Third Reich.

People like Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel, and Bishop Williamson who do not believe this account and who dare to say so in public are reviled as bigots, anti-Semites, racists, and worse. Their alternate historical scenarios are not termed simply revisionist, but are demeaned as Holocaust denial. Rudolf and Zundel were shipped to Germany where they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to three and five years, respectively.

Politicians deride Holocaust revisionist papers and conferences as "beyond the pale of international discourse and acceptable behavior." Non-Zionist Jews who participate in such revisionism, like Rabbi Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta, are denounced as "self-haters" and are shunned and spat upon. Even Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors and who wrote the book, The Holocaust Industry, has been branded a Holocaust denier.

But putting aside the virile hate directed against those who question the veracity of the typical Holocaust narrative, what is it that these people believe and say at the risk of imprisonment and bodily harm? For most Holocaust revisionists or deniers if you prefer, their arguments boil down to three simple contentions:

1. Hitler's "Final Solution" was intended to be ethnic cleansing, not extermination.

2. There were no homicidal gas chambers used by the Third Reich.

3. There were fewer than 6 million Jews killed of the 55 million who died in WWII.

Are these revisionist contentions so odious as to cause those who believe them to be reviled, beaten, and imprisoned? More importantly, is it possible that revisionist contentions are true, or even partially true, and that they are despised because they contradict the story of the Holocaust, a story which has been elevated to the level of a religion in hundreds of films, memorials, museums, and docu-dramas?

Is it sacrilegious to ask, "If Hitler was intent on extermination, how did Elie Wiesel, his father, and two of his sisters survive the worst period of incarceration at Auschwitz?" Wiesel claims that people were thrown alive into burning pits, yet even the Israeli-trained guides at Auschwitz refute this claim.

Is it really "beyond international discourse" to question the efficacy and the forensic evidence of homicidal gas chambers? If other myths, like making soap from human fat, have been dismissed as Allied war propaganda, why is it "unacceptable behavior" to ask if the gas chamber at Dachau was not reconstructed by the Americans because no other homicidal gas chamber could be found and used as evidence at the Nuremburg trials?

For more than fifty years Jewish scholars have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to document each Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust. The Nazis were German, obsessed with paperwork and recordkeeping. Yet only 3 million names have been collected and many of them died of natural causes. So why is it heresy to doubt that fewer than 6 million Jews were murdered in the Second World War?

"Holocaust Denial" might be no more eccentric or no more criminal than claiming the earth is flat, except that the Holocaust itself has been used as the sword and shield in the quest to build a Jewish state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, where even today over half the population is not Jewish.

The Holocaust narrative allows Yad Vashem, the finest Holocaust museum in the world, to repeat the mantra of "Never Forget" while it sits on Arab lands stolen from Ein Karem and overlooking the unmarked graves of Palestinians massacred by Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin. It allows Elie Wiesel to boast of having worked for these same terrorists (as a journalist, not a fighter) while refusing to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the war crimes his employer committed. It makes Jews the ultimate victim no matter how they dispossess or dehumanize or ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinian people.

The Holocaust story eliminates any comparison of Ketziot or Gaza to the concentration camps they indeed are. It memorializes the resistance of Jews in the ghettos of Europe while steadfastly denying any comparison with the resistance of Palestinians in Hebron and throughout the West Bank. It allows claims that this year’s Hanukah Massacre in Gaza, with a kill ratio of 100 to one, was a “proportionate response” to Palestinian resistance to unending occupation.

The Holocaust is used to silence critics of Israel in what the Jewish scholar, Marc Ellis, has called the ecumenical deal: you Christians look the other way while we bludgeon the Palestinians and build our Jewish state and we won't remind you that Hitler was a good Catholic, a confirmed “soldier of Christ,” long before he was a bad Nazi.

The Holocaust narrative of systematic, industrialized extermination was an important neo-conservative tool to drive the United States into Iraq. The same neo-con ideologues, like Norman Podoretz, routinely compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler and Nazism with Islamofascism with the intent of driving us into Iran. The title of the Israeli conference at Yad Vashem made this crystal clear: "Holocaust Denial: Paving the Way to Genocide."

"Remember the Holocaust" will be the battle cry of the next great clash of good (Judeo/Christian values) and evil (radical Islamic aggression) and those who question it must be demonized if not burned at the stake.

Daniel McGowan

Professor Emeritus

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Geneva, NY 14456

Because of admonishment by the administration, it is hereby stated that the above remarks are solely those of the author. Hobart and William Smith Colleges neither condone nor condemn these opinions. Furthermore, the author has been instructed to use his personal email address of mcgowandaniel@yahoo.com and not his college email at mcgowan@hws.edu for those wishing to contact him with comments or criticisms.

(End quote from the Finger Lakes Times of Sept. 27, 2009)

Letter of Six Hobart and William Smith Colleges Professors

“We...request the removal of Professor McGowan’s honorary title of “Emeritus Professor.”

October 3, 2009

President Gearan,

This letter is a response to Daniel McGowan’s defense of Holocaust deniers published in the Finger Lakes Times on September 27. The content of the essay and its publication on the eve of Yom Kippur was appalling. We are writing to you because of the disgrace to Hobart and William Smith caused by McGowan’s continued use of the institutional imprimatur and his honorary title of “Emeritus Professor” to lend credence in disseminating his personal beliefs. He has every right as a private citizen to hold and spew forth whatever beliefs he may happen to have, but we ask you to prevent the use of his title and the name of Hobart and William Smith from contributing to its effects in the future.

It should be clear that while McGowan is claiming to raise legitimate historical and free speech issues, Holocaust denial has a history of being no more than thinly veiled anti-Semitism. When historians talk about the Holocaust what they mean is that approximately six million Jews and several millions of others were killed in an intentional and systematic fashion by the Nazis using a number of different means, including death by shooting and in gas chambers. This is the position held universally by scholars. The Holocaust deniers reject the historicity of the Holocaust based on three types of assertions. They reject the number of 6 million, the existence of killing camps, and the element of intentionality.

Professor McGowan’s article is an example of denying the reality of the most studied and documented event in history. Holocaust denial carries absolutely no weight among academic scholars in any field whatsoever. Additionally, denying the undisputed facts of the holocaust is not a way to show support for the Palestinians. For example, his argument denying the intentionality of the Nazi’s execution of Jews is that there is not sufficient proof that it was designed to exterminate the Jewish population. Rather, he asserts, it may have been merely a program of “ethnic cleansing.” The suggestion that this somehow makes it less morally reprehensible speaks for itself, as we all know that the term “ethnic cleansing” was introduced to make genocide sound more palatable.

Professor McGowan’s position is a classic case of blaming the victims for their own victimization. Promo Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved that what he most feared was echoed in a remark by one of his SS guards: That if he somehow managed to live through this hell no one would believe his descriptions of Auschwitz. Sadly, for some, that day has arrived.

Freedom of speech is a right for citizens in a democracy that should be vigorously protected, especially when we find the content of that speech to be abhorrent. Colleges and universities have an educational obligation to encourage scholarship that reflectsperspectives outside the mainstream of public political discourse, and we encourage that.

Hate speech, on the other hand, is a trickier issue for campuses to wrestle with because while free speech has a special value, we have a duty to protect members of our diverse community from unsupported vitriol being espoused under the name of our colleges and its professors. We faculty of all persuasions, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and atheists, are deeply offended and also share a special concern about the impact of such hateful messages (and its association with us) upon our Jewish students, staff, and faculty.

Professor McGowan’s actions do not meet our expectation of minimally rational and minimally humane discourse. As human beings who see the transparent motivation and effects of such writing, we are deeply disturbed and saddened to see a Hobart and William Smith title attached to it. We therefore request the removal of Professor McGowan’s honorary title of “Emeritus Professor.”

This is an attempt, admittedly futile, to remove some of the slime thrown at me in a letter addressed to President Gearan and circulated to over 250 people on October 3, 2009. It was written by Jim McKinster and five other faculty members and allegedly signed by 32 people in all. I heard about it by happenstance soon after it was circulated, but neither the President nor any of the six who circulated it was willing to provide me with a copy. That is a typical cowardly response employed by those who use this smear method to accuse, try, and censure someone who dares to speak truth to power. (I finally got a copy last week, hence the 20-month delay in my response.)Their letter and with a copy of the op-ed I wrote in the Finger Lakes Times are attached.Allow me to refute the lies and innuendos that these “colleagues” have levied against me, behind my back. Since each of you received the detractors’ letter, I am sending you this rebuttal.1. The purpose of my op-ed was to define Holocaust denial. That should be clear from the byline “What do deniers really mean?” It was submitted in response to the media frenzy and demonization of President Ahmadinejad who addressed the UN General Assembly and whose picture was shown above my guest appearance piece. Instead of acknowledging this, my faculty detractors feigned outrage that it appeared on the eve of Yom Kippur. I had nothing to do with the timing of the article and make no apology for when it appeared vis-à-vis a Jewish holiday.2. More egregiously these faculty detractors claimed to know my “personal beliefs” and claimed that I mis-used my title of professor emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges to lend them credence. That is simply a lie. Nowhere are my personal beliefs stated. Moreover my op-ed included an exceptionally long disclaimer showing The Colleges neither condone nor condemn what I had written.3. The faculty detractors claim that “Holocaust denial carries absolutely no weight among academic scholars in any field whatsoever.” That is simply not true. There are a number of scholars who write about the typical Holocaust narrative and are willing to fight the slime hurled at them by ardent Zionists and by others who feel it their duty to protect the narrative which serves as the sword and shield of apartheid Israel. (BTW, our former provost and former William Smith Dean both demanded that I not use the word “apartheid” in connection with Israel; granted the term was used in the Israeli press and later by President Carter, but it was not “suitable discourse” on our campus where we routinely claim to support free speech and diversity of opinion.)4. The faculty detractors write that “denying undisputed facts of the holocaust (sic) is not a way to show support for the Palestinians.” First, the three tenets of Holocaust revisionism are clearly not “undisputed. To the contrary, they are hotly and passionately disputed; people’s lives are ruined when they even question these “facts.” In fourteen countries you can get jail time for disputing “facts” surrounding the Holocaust.Second, disputing “facts” is what science and historical analysis is all about. We academics have no problem discussing and disputing whether or not Jesus Christ is truly the son of God, or if President Obama’s birth certificate is real, or if President Roosevelt knew a Japanese attack on Hawaii was imminent, but we are not allowed to discuss or dispute the six-million figure.Third, what gives these detractors the credentials to pontificate on what supports or hurts Palestinians? Some of them have been responsible for feting at Hobart and William Smith Colleges anti-Palestinian demagogues including Wiesel and even Netanyahu. They helped give Madeleine Albright our highest humanitarian award, which is a disgrace in light of her statement that the death of over 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it.” Was I the only one to protest that award?I have team-taught a senior course on the Palestinians. I have published books and articles on the Palestinian Naqba and the massacre of Arab civilians by Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin. I have built the only United States memorial to their dispossession and ethnic cleansing. I don’t need, nor accept, biased comments on how to support Palestinians.5. Calling Holocaust historical revisionism “Holocaust denial” is unnecessarily pejorative. It might be fine for Fox News, but it is not conducive to academic discourse. To call Holocaust revisionism “thinly veiled anti-Semitism” is simply untrue and it demeans scholars and others, including Jews, who question the Holocaust doctrine as we are fed it in hundreds of films, books, articles, and commentaries. Terms like Holocaust Industry, Holocaust Fatigue, Holocaust professional, Holocaust wannabes, and Holocaust High Priest were not coined by “deniers” or anti-Semites; they were coined by Jews. (The High Priest quip is an obvious reference to Wiesel; it was made by Tova Reich in her book My Holocaust. Tova’s husband, Walter Reich, was the former director of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington.)In 1946 the US government told us that over 20 million people were murdered by Hitler. Now that figure is said to be 11 million; it is literally carved in stone at the US Holocaust Memorial. For years we were told that over 4 million were killed at Auschwitz, but by the early 1990s that figure was reduced to 1.5 million. Wiesel tells us that people were thrown alive onto pyres; he claims to have seen it with his own eyes; today Yad Vashem trained guides at Auschwitz say that is not true. These are examples of historical revisionism and they are not inherently anti-Semitic.6. It is most interesting to see academic colleagues say, “(a)s we all know ... the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was introduced to make genocide sound more palatable.” That means they either deny that Palestinians have been (and continue to be) ethnically cleansed or they agree that Israel is performing genocide of the Palestinian people.7. While the faculty detractors found my speech to be “abhorrent,” they seemed unable to find fault with a single fact I presented. So they resorted to name-calling and labeled the piece “hate speech” and “unsupported vitriol” and smeared my name to hundreds of people. I am surprised that Abe Foxman or the Mossad did not come calling.8. The detractors genuinely were concerned about the op-ed’s impact on our Jewish students, staff, and faculty. But maybe it is time for all members of the community to see the Holocaust for what it really was and not the unquestionable, unimpeachable, doctrine that makes Jewish suffering superior to that of other people. Maybe it is time to recognize that Zionism as a political movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine began long before the Holocaust and that Zionist discrimination, dehumanization, and dispossession of the Palestinian people should not be excused by it. Maybe it is time to see that since over half the population (within the borders controlled by Israel) is not Jewish, the dream of creating a Jewish state has failed. Walling in the non-Jews or putting them in Bantustans or driving them into Jordan will not make it a purely Jewish state. The nationalist allegiance to “blood and soil” has been a failure and that should be the real lesson of the Holocaust.9. To say that my op-ed “does not meet our expectation of minimally rational and minimally humane discourse’ is nonsense. The piece is well written, well substantiated, and quite humane.10. But the faculty detractors are quite right about one thing; they were deeply disturbed and saddened to see a Hobart and William Smith title attached to it. Diversity and perspectives outside the mainstream are to be encouraged, but not if they question Jewish power, Israel, or Holocaust doctrine. Apparently that is beyond the pale.11. The demand to President Gearan to remove my title of Professor Emeritus is both classic and stupid. Consider how little it would accomplish. I would be supposedly ashamed and I would have to buy a walking pass at the gym that would cost me $40 a year. Would it save HWS from being associated with my writings? Of course not; I would simply use the title of “Former Professor Emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges” with no disclaimer.But what it would really do is to cast me into the briar bush with Norm Finkelstein, Marc Ellis, Paul Eisen, Henry Herskovitz, Gilad Atzmon, Rich Siegel, and Hedy Epstein (a Holocaust survivor), all friends of mine and all anti-Zionists. Professors Ost, Linton, and Mertens apparently saw this and I credit (or blame) them for my still having the emeritus title.Lest I seem irreverent or unscathed by this widely-circulated smear letter from my detractors, allow me to admit that I have been hurt by it. Many faculty and other HWS folks now shun me as a persona non grata largely because they only read the slime and never a rebuttal. Of course until now there could be no rebuttal because the smear letter was withheld from me. (Even the Provost’s request to send me a copy was refused.)My former student and long-time friend, David Deming, who is now the Chair of the HWS Board does not answer my letters. President Gearan does not answer them either. Board member, Roy Dexheimer, disparages me and wonders if I fell “off my meds.” Another Board member, Stuart Pilch, took it a step further and made a threatening phone call to my home and a promise “to hunt me down.”But the biggest disappointment is with those faculty detractors who never came to discuss or complain about what I had written, but instead chose to spin their own interpretation, which was full of lies and half truths, and then disseminate their smear as widely as possible. Should any of you be one of the signatories, my door is open for further discussion. And if you know the names of the other signatories, I would appreciate your sharing that information with me.

In the “seminar accredited for Continuing Legal Education (CLE) by the Missouri Bar” reported in the press release below, St. Louis, Missouri lawyers who attend will be schooled by Chabad rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud, a handbook on lying, deceit and wrong-doing whichdesecrates the name and memory of Jesus Christ (Sanhedrin 43a; Gittin 57a), and His Blessed Mother Mary (Sanhedrin 106a; Kallah 51a), permits sex with children (Sanhedrin 69b in The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition [Random House, 1999] vol. 19, p. 13; also cf. Ketubot 11b and Sanhedrin 54b) and teaches that Judaic males are above God (Bava Metzia 59b).

Chabad (also known as “Chabad-Lubavitch") is a Hasidic faction of Orthodox Judaism that derives its halacha (law) from the pagan-occult Zohar (Kabbalah), and the Babylonian Talmud, along with the sacred texts of the founder of Chabad, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyady. One of Rabbi Zalman’s texts, Tanya, teaches that the souls of gentiles "contain no good whatever” (Opening the Tanya, p. 43).

Chabad-Lubavitch supports Judaic racist-terrorist “settler” groups in the Palestinian occupied territories. Individual Chabadniks have promoted Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer who slaughtered forty Palestinians while they knelt in prayer in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, on Purim, 1994.

Chabad-Lubavitch Community Center and United Lubavitcher Yeshiva hosted a U.S. speaking tour for one of Chabad’s rabbis, Yitzhak Ginsburg, president of the racist Od Yosef Chai yeshiva in the violence-prone West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, and the author of a text praising Goldstein, which is titled, Five General Religious Duties Which Lie Behind the Act of the Saintly, Late Rabbi Baruch Goldstein.

Tea Party golem and their leaders in Congress are running amok over the alleged possibility of Islamic Sharia law being implemented in the United States, while Babylonian Talmudic law continues its deep penetration of American jurisprudence without a peep of protest from these “Constitutionalists" who shriek alarms from coast to coast about the horrors of “Sharia.”

St. Louis, Missouri — Chabad of Greater St. Louis will host its annual Conference on Talmud and Contemporary Law on June 1. The seminar has been accredited for Continuing Legal Education (CLE) by the Missouri Bar since its inception 16 years ago, and will be held at the Center of Clayton. It is open to the entire St. Louis legal community.

The conference was designed to provide a forum for the comparative analysis of legal, ethical and public policy issues under Jewish and secular law. It offers modern legal minds the opportunity to explore age-old Jewish legal principles and their relevance to current law and public policy.

Participants will be addressed by prominent scholars at the intersection of Talmudic and secular law.This program is offered by Chabad of Greater St. Louis in partnership with the Cardoza Society of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis.

PRESENTERS:

SAMUEL J. LEVINE is Professor of Law and Director of the Jewish Law Institute at Touro Law Center. Previously he served on the faculty of Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California. He has published more than forty law review articles and has lectured widely in the areas of legal ethics, criminal law, law and religion, Jewish law, and constitutional law. Professor Levine graduated cum laude from Fordham Law School and with highest honors as a James Kent Scholar from Columbia Law School.

RABBI SHLOMO YAFFE applies his prodigious mind and booming voice to the mastery and teaching of Talmudic law and Chassidic philosophy. A prolific writer and speaker, he received his Rabbinic ordination from the Central Chabad Rabbinic Academy in New York. He is the Dean of the Institute for American and Talmudic Law, and lectures nationwide to appreciative audiences. He currently serves as the Scholar-in-Residence at Chabad of Harvard University.

TOPICS:

THE BIN LADEN KILLING: EXTRA JUDICIAL EXECUTION, INCARCERATION AND OTHER SANCTIONS IN JUDAIC LAW - What are the factors distinguishing between the prosecution of warfare and the need for legal procedure? We will examine the highly developed sense for the role of the extra judicial in Talmudic law, and compare this with contemporary American and International Law.

LAWYERLY ADVICE: VIGOROUS COUNSEL OR SUBORNING PERJURY? - One of the most troubling "grey areas" in the practice of law is the ethical question of where a lawyer’s advice crosses the line from helping the client make a good case into providing a recipe for perjury. We will examine both precedent and practice regarding this thorny issue in the American legal system, and we will explore the means that Judaic law uses to address this ethical problem.

EXAMINING AMERICAN CODES OF PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY THROUGH THE PERSPECTIVE OF JEWISH LAW AND ETHICS - A critique of the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct, arguing that the rules leave too many ethical decisions to the discretion of the legal professional. We will highlight principles in Jewish law which impose defined ethical obligations that are mandatory rather than optional.

TALMUDIC CITATIONS IN AMERICAN JUDICIAL OPINIONS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS - A survey of judicial citations to Jewish and Talmudic law in several complex and controversial areas of American law. Through a careful analysis of these judicial opinions we will explore the accuracy and relevance of these citations, and their application to the legal issues at hand.

DIRECTIONS:
The Center of Clayton is located on Gay Ave., just south of Maryland Ave., east of the I-170 Ladue exit.

REGISTRATION:
To register please complete the online registration form below. Payment can be made via the online registration form or by mailing a check. Checks should be made payable to Chabad of Greater St. Louis and can be mailed to 8124 Delmar Blvd. 63130. For additional information or late registration please email CLE@showmechabad.com or call 314-725-0400.

CREDITS:
5.2 MCLE Credits, including 2.6 Legal Ethics Credits

COST: $175*
*Please indicate in the comments section if you are a Cordoza Society Member to receive $50 discount

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer on Tuesday, May 17, capped the National Days of Remembrance, the congressionally mandated commemoration of the Holocaust, by focusing on a legal legacy stretching from the Nuremberg Tribunal to present-day efforts to hold war criminals accountable, such as the International Criminal Court.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer attends a reception hosted by President Barack Obama in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month at the White House, Tuesday.

“I come here as a judge and a Jew,” Justice Breyer said at a Capitol ceremony sponsored by the Holocaust Memorial Museum, in part to remember “that the Holocaust story ended with a fair trial.”

Justice Breyer recalled that the late Justice Robert Jackson called his service as chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, which tried 24 surviving Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity, “infinitely more important than my work on the Supreme Court.” Justice Jackson had opened his case by telling the world that “the wrongs we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

While Justice Jackson aimed to defuse Holocaust deniers by building a “drab case” on the Nazis’ own records of their crimes, Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner “sought out survivors of the Holocaust to bear witness” in the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. With the trial televised internationally, “for the first time many people heard the Holocaust survivors tell their stories with their own voices.”

“Both trials had a role to play,” Justice Breyer said. “The documented record prevents history from doubting what was done; the compelling personal stories help prevent the future from forgetting the victims themselves, their stories and their humanity.”

Justice Breyer linked those trials to more recent efforts to establish accountability for genocide and war crimes. He mentioned the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the International Criminal Court, whose prosecutor this week said he would seek to try Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi for crimes against humanity. (Justice Breyer makes no mention of Israeli massacres in Gaza, or of Israeli war crimes in Lebanon, in Beirut in August, 1982; at the El Khiam concentration camp, or in Qana against a United Nations refugee camp (twice). There has been no accountability for any of these atrocities perpetrated by “the Jewish state” — they are unpunished by international courts. Elie Hobeika, a former Lebanese ally of Ariel Sharon, was mysteriously rubbed out gangland style shortly before he was to testify against Sharon in a proposed European war crime trial that collapsed in the wake of Hobeika’s murder. - Hoffman).

Such institutions are “imperfect,” the justice said. “We need only look around today’s world to see that the rights, rules, and obligations that the law sets forth are no more powerful than the human will to enforce them.

“The Talmud teaches us ‘it is not incumbent upon you to complete the work,’” Justice Breyer said. “’But neither are you free to evade it.”

A webcast of the event, "Justice and Accountability in the Face of Genocide: What Have We Learned?" is here. Justice Breyer’s address begins at 55:35.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

There was no evidence that Demjanjuk committed a specific crime. The prosecution in Germany was based on the theory that if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing -- the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts!

***

Demjanjuk Convicted for Role in Nazi Death Camp

New York Times May 12, 2011

AN AFTERWORD BY MICHAEL HOFFMAN IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWS THIS REPORT

MUNICH — After a trial lasting almost 18 months, John Demjanjuk, a retired American autoworker who has been the subject of more than three decades of legal proceedings over his Nazi-era past, was convicted here on Thursday of helping to force some 28,000 Jews to their deaths during the Holocaust. He showed no reaction as the court handed down a five-year prison term, The Associated Press reported. It was not immediately clear how much credit he would get for time already served. His defense lawyers have already said they would appeal the conviction. His trial was one of the last of accused Nazi war criminals.

Prosecutors had charged that Mr. Demjanjuk, 91, worked as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943. His trial in Munich, beginning in December 2009, was the second time Mr. Demjanjuk has been prosecuted — he was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 only to have his conviction overturned five years later as a case of mistaken identity.

When the trial opened in Munich, Mr. Demjanjuk was listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as its most wanted Nazi war criminal.

Mr. Demjanjuk declined to make a final statement as he arrived in the courtroom in a wheelchair pushed by a German police officer. He was wearing a pale blue baseball cap and dark glasses.

His trial was held despite arguments by his lawyers and family that he was too sick to participate, because he suffered from ailments including bone marrow disease. Doctors, however, concluded that he could stand trial provide that hearings were restricted to two 90-minute sessions a day.

As survivors and defendants have aged and died, the prosecution of Nazi-era war criminals has become increasingly difficult because, 66 years after the end of World War II, few potential witnesses are still alive. In the absence of specific evidence against him, the case against Mr. Demjanjuk rested on the prosecution's charge that anyone working at the camp at the time he was there shared responsibility for its function of systematic murder.

"The court is convinced that the defendant served as a guard at Sobibor from March 27, 1943, to mid-September, 1943," the presiding judge, Ralph Alt said, according to the A.P.

The prosecution had also produced an identity card from the Nazi S.S. that, prosecutors alleged, shows a young Demjanjuk and indicated that he had undergone training at an S.S. camp. Mr. Demjanjuk's lawyers said that the card was forged by the Soviet K.G.B. (The FBI also said this, but the NY Times does not mention that fact here -- Hoffman)

Mr. Demjanjuk, who was born in Ukraine, was a soldier in the Soviet Army, fighting against the Germans, until he was captured in the Crimea in 1942.

He says he spent most of the remainder of the war as a prisoner. But according to prosecutors, he went to the S.S. training camp in Trawniki, Poland, where foreigners were trained to work as volunteers in the death camps.

The case against Mr. Demjanjuk involved some 15 transport trains known to have arrived between April and July 1943 from the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, carrying 29,579 people. Prosecutors initially charged Mr. Demjanjuk with 27,900 counts based on the theory that some must have died in transit or been spared for a time to work at the camp. By the end of the trial on Thursday, that figure had been revised to 28,060 counts.

Some 250,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor, most of them poisoned with exhaust fumes.

Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 as the infamously sadistic Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, only to have his conviction overturned in 1993. He was freed by Israel's Supreme Court after evidence surfaced suggesting that another man was most likely to have been Ivan the Terrible.

In a statement on its Web site the day before the verdict, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said: "This case has historic meaning because while it may be the last 'major' case tried in Germany, it is the first time a non-German has been charged by Germany with Nazi war crimes and brought to trial in Germany."

Speaking to the German news agency on Thursday, Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the organization was "very satisfied" that Mr. Demjanjuk had been sentenced to a prison term. The court's decision "sends a very strong message that even many years after the crimes of the Holocaust, perpetrators can be held to account for their misdeeds," he said.

Avner Shalev, the head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance authority in Jerusalem said that, while "no trial can bring back those that were murdered," the conviction of Mr. Demjanjuk showed that theere was "no statute of limitations on the crimes of the Holocaust" and that the killings "could not have taken place without the participation of myriads of Europeans on many levels."

Elan Steinberg, the Vice President of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants said in a statement that the conviction was "a clarion pronouncement that the pursuit of justice should know no barriers of time and geography."

MICHAEL HOFFMAN'S AFTERWORD

Simon Wiesenthal was a con-man and a fantasist.

Look at the lavish attention paid to the statements filled with vengeful, Talmudic crowing by Efraim Zuroff, Avner Shalev and Elan Steinberg, and no coverage given to statements by Demjanjuk's family and supporters.

Why are there no Judaic kapos prosecuted for aiding the Nazis? It is said they were coerced. Demjanjuk was a prisoner of war. No coercion there?

Can any accused "Nazi" get a fair trial in Zionist Germany, where defense attorneys can be arrested for defending their accused clients too vigorously, and where writers and publishers such as Ernst Zundel, rot for years in prison because they dare to doubt Holocaustianity, the last truly believed religion in the otherwise agnostic West?

In 91-year-old John Demjanjuk, the Zionists have their pound of flesh.

There was no evidence that Demjanjuk committed a specific crime. The prosecution in Germany was based on the theory that if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing -- the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts.

Integral to the German prosecution's case was an SS identity card that allegedly shows a picture of a young Demjanjuk, and indicates he trained at the SS Trawniki camp and was posted to Sobibor.

Though court experts said the card appears genuine, the defense maintains it is a fake produced by the Soviet KGB.

The U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations also has said the card is genuine, but documents unearthed by The Associated Press indicate that the FBI at one time had doubts similar to those aired by Demjanjuk's defense about the evidence -- though the material was never turned over to them.

In a 1985 report, the FBI's Cleveland, Ohio, field office concluded that: "Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB."

The revelation has led to new court action in the U.S., with a District Court judge in Cleveland on Tuesday agreeing to appoint a public defender to represent Demjanjuk there, raising the prospect of renewing the decades-old case.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

New Yorker Michael Santomauro, an indefatigable revisionist writer and activist who resides, improbably enough, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is being targeted by a Zionist terror organization. The misnamed "Jewish Defense Organization" headed by the violent psychopath Mordechai Levy, has been terrorizing revisionist writers with impunity since at least the 1980s.

In 1989, Levy was charged with attempted murder for shooting at three people who were standing outside Mr. Levy's home in New York, one of whom was trying to serve him with court papers in a California slander suit. A 69-year-old man was wounded in that shooting, and Mr. Levy, then age 30, was convicted of first-degree assault. After conviction he was released from prison in record time. Even after the shooting, the Zionist New York Times gave favorable coverage to Levy:

New York: Manhattan: Protest Over Holocaust Skeptic
New York Times | October 25, 2004

About two dozen protesters chanting "evict the Nazi" rallied yesterday in front of the Upper West Side apartment building of a man who has questioned historical accounts of the Holocaust. Some of the two dozen or so demonstrators, who were watched by a similar number of police officers, -- said that the man, Michael Santomauro, had been holding meetings with his supporters in the building, on 72nd Street near West End Avenue. ''We have to take a stand on this hatred being brought into the community,'' said James Vrettos, 55, a sociology professor at Yeshiva University.

Mordechai Levy, above, of the Jewish Defense Organization, said he organized the rally after hearing that Mr. Santomauro had held a gathering at a nearby church last month. A doorman in the building, Jay Roman, said that he knew of no meetings. Mr. Santomauro, who founded a roommate matching service in 1979, could not be reached for comment yesterday, but in an article in The New York Times in 2003, he called himself an ''amateur Holocaust revisionist." (End quote)

Notice that there is no reference in the preceding New York Times report to the fact that Levy is a convicted gunman who has shot people. Almost everywhere Louis Farrakhan speaks, the media report that decades ago he once referred to Judaism as a “gutter religion,” while with Levy, the media have amnesia concerning his record of violence.

"Like any American, I have the right to host meetings, distribute information, and inquire into subject matters as part of our first amendment. As a free rights activist, I feel that no subject matter should be taboo or criminalized and that especially when a subject matter is controversial and sensitive, like the Holocaust, it deserves even more attention, inquiry, debate and discussion in a respectful manner.

"Like me, the Jewish Defense Organization has a right to free speech, but what they are saying is untrue. I am not a Nazi, and oppose all that Nazism stands for including all other schools of fascism such as Zionism, which the Jewish Defense Organization supports. Why would the Jewish Defense Organization support an apartheid state who seeks a racially pure state? The Jewish Defense Organization is racist! No decent American would or should support the racist government of Israel, unless you are a racist like the Zionist Jewish Defense Organization--they are the Nazis!

"Also, the Jewish Defense Organization is not correct, in that I do not sell Nazi materials or hold Neo-Nazi meetings, or anything of the sort from any location.

"The location they are targeting has nothing to do with my work, so clearly the Jewish Defense Organization is mistaken. The Jewish Defense Organization obviously has a right to rally, as they have in the past at my home on the Upper West Side.

"And nope! I don't pay the Jewish Defense Organization to rally so I can sell more books!"